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Thursday, 21 February 2013

Fox News recently claimed that "solar won't work in America because
it's not as sunny as Germany". Such statements are common for a
network that has long lost its credibility. Unfortunately too many
take such gibberish at face value. Thus columns like
“environmentalism or obstructionism?” are not
surprising, but in the end it's the facts that matter:

Global warming is real. For years we have been experiencing record
heat waves, droughts, wild fires, etc., and while seawater levels
are rising, storms like hurricane Sandy become major threats
to low lying areas along coast lines.

The main culprit for global warming are greenhouse gases like
carbon dioxide, resulting from the burning of fossil fuels,
especially coal and oil.

While China overall emits more than we do, the US leads in per
capita emissions. The average US citizen produces three times more
carbon dioxide than the average Chinese citizen.

Thursday, 14 February 2013

My op-ed in the VDT today; I've added links, plus some more after the op-ed.

Finally! Kewaunee, Calvert Cliffs, and now Crystal River
permanently closing say it's time for Georgia to stop wasting money
on Southern Company's already over-budget and increasingly-late
nukes and get on with solar power and wind off the coast: for
jobs, for energy independence, and for clean air and plenty of
clean water.

Monday, 14 January 2013

A
new poll
says 94% want new energy balanced with clean air and water, 86% want to shift from coal and nuclear to wind and water power, and 79% are concerned about shale gas fracking affecting water quality.

92 percent of Americans think “U.S. energy planning and
decision making” should be based on “a comprehensive
understanding of what our national water resources are”
— a national water roadmap that Congress asked for, but which
was never produced. The national water roadmap attracts the support
of 92 percent of Republicans, 89 percent of Independents, and 94
percent of Democrats.

86 percent of Americans want leadership on shifting from coal and
nuclear energy to wind and solar. Support for this approach exists
across party lines, including 72 percent of Republicans, 83 percent
of Independents, and 97 percent of Democrats.

86 percent of Americans “support more studies of the health
and environmental consequences of the chemicals” used in
fracking. Supporters of this approach include 81 percent of
Republicans, 84 percent of Independents, and 89 percent of
Democrats.

Three quarters of Americans have heard of fracking, with 51 percent
saying they are very or somewhat familiar with it. 79 percent of
Americans are concerned about fracking “as it relates to water
quality.”

Coal is dead. Nuclear is going down.
Solar will eat the lunch of utilities that don't start generating it.

Can Georgia Power and Southern Company (SO) read that handwriting on the wall?
They can't fight Moore's Law, which has steadily brought the cost
of solar photovoltaic (PV) energy down for thirty years now, and
shows no signs of stopping.
This is the same Moore's Law that has put a computer in your pocket
more powerful than a computer
that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1982
and was used by an entire company.
Solar PV costs dropped 50% last year.
Already all the new U.S. electric capacity installed this September
was solar and wind.
As this trend continues, solar will become so much more cost-effective
than any fossil or nuclear fuel power that nobody will be able to ignore it.

Rogers and Kennedy explained this phenomenon:

The seismic shift in how we all use cell phones and mobile technology to access the internet almost snuck up on the incumbent technologies and the monopolies that made money selling us landline telephones and a crappy service. Now, we’re all using apps on smartphones all of the time. So too, the shift to a scaled, solar-powered future built around the modular technology at the heart of solar power—the photovoltaic solar cell—will come as a surprise to many. We call it the solar ascent, and it is happening every day in a million ways.

Saturday, 08 December 2012

Not really about jobs, and not about feeding electricity into the grid:
the new biomass plant near Dublin, GA is about saving that company money on electricity: but at what cost to the state and to local residents?

A new biomass power plant announced Thursday is expected to bring
hundreds of related jobs and a direct $95 million investment.

A statement from the office of Gov. Nathan Deal said the plant
itself will bring 35 permanent jobs to Laurens County.

Compare 35 permanent jobs for $95 million to
MAGE SOLAR's 350 jobs for $30 million.
That's about $2,700,000 per job for this deal,
vs. $85,714 per job for MAGE SOLAR.
Which would make MAGE SOLAR's facility more than 30 times more effective
at producing permanent jobs.

Wednesday, 26 September 2012

If you're quick, you may be able to sell solar from your roof
to Georgia Power.
If the PSC approves a pending request.
If you get in before that new quota gets filled.
And if you're a Georgia Power customer.
The rest of us?
Not until the
1973 Georgia Electric Territorial Act
is changed.
Until then, Georgia will continue to lag way behind New Jersey in solar power.

Georgia Power filed Wednesday seeking permission from state
regulators to more than triple the amount of solar power it uses to
generate electricity for its 2.4 million customers by swapping it
for what was already planned from other renewable sources.

What "other renewable sources"?

The Georgia Power plan won't affect rates because it is based on
paying the solar providers what it would have paid the biomass
provider, 13 cents per kilowatt hour, which is already figured into
customer's rates.

OK, that's good, because it means biomass is well and truly
dead in Georgia.
But it also means Georgia Power isn't very serious about solar,
if all it's doing is fiddling with accounting for the small amount
of power biomass might have produced and not going for the real
numbers solar can produce.
OK, how many solar megawatts?

Thursday, 30 August 2012

On the day she died, Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor
Ostrom published
her last article, in Project Syndicate, 12 June 2012,
Green from the Grassroots,

This grassroots diversity in “green policymaking” makes
economic sense. “Sustainable cities” attract the
creative, educated people who want to live in a pollution-free,
modern urban environment that suits their lifestyles. This is where
future growth lies. Like upgrading a mobile phone, when people see
the benefits, they will discard old models in a flash.

Of course, true sustainability goes further than pollution control.
City planners must look beyond municipal limits and analyze flows of
resources —
energy,
food,
water, and
people —
into and
out of their cities.

Worldwide, we are seeing a heterogeneous collection of cities
interacting in a way that could have far-reaching influence on how
Earth's entire life-support system evolves. These cities are
learning from one another, building on good ideas and jettisoning
poorer ones. Los Angeles took decades to implement pollution
controls, but other cities, like Beijing, converted rapidly when
they saw the benefits. In the coming decades, we may see a global
system of interconnected sustainable cities emerging. If successful,
everyone will want to join the club.

Yet another comprehensive article. I might also add that one of the major down-falls (if not the most significant) of large-scale conversions to natural gas is the resources lifecycle methane emissions.

As your readers likely know, Methane is about twenty times as 'potent' a greenhouse gas as Carbon Dioxide. That is to say, it is far more efficient at trapping heat then Co2. So, less methane has a far greater impact on climate disruption then more Co2.

Natural Gas, from the point of combustion, releases about half the amount of Co2 released from burning coal, and about 30% of what's released in burning oil. To keep the benefits of reduced Co2 levels when switching from coal to natural gas, natural gas wells and transport lines must leak less then 2% of methane into the atmosphere. Recent research from Cornell is showing that Fracking wells are regularly releasing more then 4%, and often as much as 8% —far exceeding the 2% threshold— and thus making Natural Gas a far more dangerous resource for climate stability.

For once some positive change is happening through filing lawsuits in multiple states: on behalf of the atmosphere. Here's a writeup on that July Texas judge ruling that spells out more of what it means.

The "public trust" doctrine is a legal principle derived from English Common Law. Traditionally it has applied to water resources. The waters of the state are deemed a public resource owned by and available to all citizens equally for the purposes of navigation, fishing, recreation, and other uses. The owner cannot use that resource in a way that interferes with the public's use and interest. The public trustee, usually the state, must act

"There's a very clear lesson here. What it shows is that if you make a cleaner energy source cheaper, you will displace dirtier sources," said Roger Pielke Jr., a climate expert at the University of Colorado.

While conservation efforts, the lagging economy and greater use of renewable energy are factors in the CO2 decline, the drop-off is due mainly to low-priced natural gas, the agency said.

A frenzy of shale gas drilling in the Northeast's Marcellus Shale and in Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana has caused the wholesale price of natural gas to plummet from $7 or $8 per unit to about $3 over the past four years, making it cheaper to burn than coal for a given amount of energy produced. As a result, utilities are relying more than ever on gas-fired generating plants.

Both government and industry experts said the biggest surprise is how quickly the electric industry turned away from coal. In 2005, coal was used to produce about half of all the electricity generated in the U.S. The Energy Information Agency said that fell to 34 percent in March, the lowest level since it began keeping records nearly 40 years ago.

And that's why Southern Company (SO) turned towards natural gas: it's cheaper! SO still prefers nuclear and coal before gas, as SO CEO Thomas A. Fanning keeps reminding us. But even SO couldn't ignore "the revolution in shale gas", which is cheaper prices through fracking. Solar PV costs dropped 50% last year alone. How long can SO ignore that?

"Natural gas is not a long-term solution to the CO2 problem," Pielke warned....